HE KEPT HIS NIGHTMARE ALIVE

By Bill Jones

From The Phoenix Gazette, 10.22.1993

If you've seen any of Tim Burton's movies, you probably would not be surprised to learn that Halloween is his favorite holiday.

"To me, Halloween has always been the most fun night of the year," Burton says. "It's a night where you can be somebody else . . . where fantasy rules. It's only scary in a humorous way."

Twelve years ago, when Burton was an animator at Disney Studios, he wrote a story set in "Halloweenland." It was a place governed by a pumpkin-headed trickster named Jack Skellington who, with the best intentions, kidnaps Santa Claus so he can deliver his own terrifying toys to boys and girls.

Burton showed his story to Disney executives, hoping to turn it into a 20-minute film or TV special, a sort of "poem, maybe with Vincent Price narrating." But the power brokers at Disney thought his story was a bit too dark for their tastes.

In 1984, Burton left Disney and began mining his dark sensibility, and found that it had a certain appeal. In a very short time, he made a name for himself as a filmmaker with an offbeat style and taste. Films like Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands became box-office hits.

Burton never forgot his Halloween project about the trickster who kidnaps Santa Claus. Now, as a filmmaker with enviable bankability, he's turned The Nightmare Before Christmas into a feature-length movie, minus the Vincent Price narration.

The studio behind Burton's Nightmare? Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney.

Burton has no hard feelings over Disney nixing Nightmare 12 years ago. The timing wasn't right anyway, he says. Nor was the technology. In effect, the 12-year delay gave him the opportunity to make a much better movie.

Working with director Henry Selick, Burton has turned Nightmare into a 75-minute film that combines music, comedy and a lot of weirdness. But even more important, he has revitalized a process called stop-motion animation.

Stop-motion animation uses actual three-dimensional sets which are built and lit as in live-action movies. But the movements of the specially constructed characters are shot in the frame-by-frame style of animation.

Nightmare was filmed in a converted San Francisco warehouse that was christened Skellington Productions. More than 120 animators, artists, camera operators and technicians worked on the film for two years, utilizing 20 stages.

Burton said the script for the film grew out of his sessions with Danny Elfman, who wrote the music and lyrics.

"I hate to use the word 'organic,' " Elfman says, "but there was a very organic process here because (Tim) would come in . . . and tell me a bit of story and he'd go away and I'd write a song. Then he'd come back and I'd play it . . . It was so quick and it worked. "

Burton says the songs in Nightmare do not interrupt the story. Instead, they advance it, like a libretto.

"It's an old-fashioned style where every song tells a big chunk of story (as in) the old Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals."

As producer, Burton oversaw the Nightmare operation, but it was director Selick who worked on the front lines with the animators.

Selick says stop-motion animation requires an incredible degree of concentration, and described his artists as rare people, "generally introspective, quiet sorts," and very patient.

Selick describes stop-motion animation as infinitely more difficult than cartoon animation.

"In cartoon animation, you always get to . . . draw it, test it, repair it. . . . In stop-motion, we do go through several testing processes, but in the end they do a performance with their puppet and we go for the final take in the first take."

The interaction between stop-motion animators and their creations is more personal than the relationship between cartoon animators and their drawings. In stop-motion, everyone poses and "acts out" the puppets' roles before shooting the scene.

"They're extraordinary people," Selick says. "They are our Jack Nicholson -- that level of actor."

Selick says the technology of stop-motion animation has advanced considerably since 1933, when a gorilla puppet was turned into King Kong. But even as crude as King Kong looks by today's sophisticated standards, Selick attributes that film's enduring fascination to stop-motion animation.

"There's an inherent charm as well as a certain reality (in stop-motion) that you can't get any other way," Selick said. "Real materials, real cloth, real puppets are there on the screen bathed in real light."

As with cartoon animation, computers have become an invaluable tool in stop-motion. But even with all the new technology, Selick can still cite "a hundred ways a scene can go wrong."

The two most common things that go wrong in stop-motion animation are pops and pixilation.

"If you're going from one pose to another and there's a big jerk, like the joint that holds the ankle isn't quite tight enough and the puppet moves over, that's a pop."

Selick said the best example of pixilation is in King Kong.

"He's all covered with animal fur, and you reach in to grab the puppet and move him into a new pose. Well, that disturbs the animal fur, so while his arm may move smoothly, the fur is crawling like crazy."

But as far as Burton is concerned, the less audiences know about the technology of stop-motion animation, the better.